Hacker Cinema
Mystery Science Theater 3000
1989 · TV series · 92 min episodes · 10 seasons
Created by Joel Hodgson
A stranded spaceship pilot captured by mad scientists survives a blitz of cheesy B movies by riffing on them with his funny robot pals.
3 positive8 neutralfrom 11 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
11 comments on Hacker News
> I find it funny that casual observers on the outside are so morally opposed. ... It's really going to help mid market and below, for films that don't have Disney budgets.
Agreed. I also have a few decades of experience in film and television production, mostly in creating and deploying new digital tooling paradigms from 'desktop video' in the 90s to virtual sets to real-time 3D environments. New digital production tools have almost always had the biggest impact enabling low-end and mid-tier creatives, not big budget studio productions. In the early 90s the Amiga-based Video Toaster enabled upstart productions like Mystery Science Theater 3000 and Babylon 5. The Toaster also enabled about 95% more cable-access crap and bad porn but the other 5% was fantastically creative new stuff which couldn't have existed on indy budgets. Dramatic new production paradigms tend to unleash both democratization and disruption. Most people welcome the democratization yet reflexively fear the disruption. Today, few recall the early 90s predictions from the professional production industry of desktop video causing economic and creative doom, despite being widespread and echoed across mainstream media.
While machine learning-based production tools aren't flexible or granular enough yet for more than limited experiments, there's no reason they won't become increasingly useful for real work. IMHO they'll likely have the same kind of democratizing impact as desktop video and the Toaster - 95% more regrettable crap, some of which we're already starting to see but, eventually, also 5% more wonderfully creative stuff which wouldn't have existed without it.
> What accolades?
Any accolades, be that professional groups, people's awards, rotten tomatoes or IMDB ratings.
> Race to the bottom, least possible effort, plausibly deniable quality, gross exploitation, capitalist bottom line - those are all things I'd use to describe current "art" awards like Grammy, Oscars, Cannes, etc.
I find them ridiculous in many ways, but no, one thing they're definitely not is a race to the bottom.
If you want to see what a race to the bottom looks like, The Room has a reputation for being generally terrible, "bad movie nights" are a thing, and Mystery Science Theater 3000's schtick is to poke fun at bad movies.
> The media industry is run by exploiting artists for licensing rights.
Yes
> The middle men and publishers add absolutely nothing to the mix. Google or Spotify or platforms arguably add value by surfacing, searching, categorizing, and so on, but not anywhere near the level of revenue capture they rationalize as their due.
I disagree. I think that every tech since a medium became subject to mass reproduction (different for video and audio, as early films were famously silent) has pushed things from a position close to egalitarianism towards a winner-takes-all. This includes Google: already-popular things become more popular, because Google knows you're more likely to engage with the more popular thing than the less popular thing. This dynamic also means that while anyone will be free to make their own personal vision (although most of us will have all the artistic talent of an inexperienced Tommy Wiseau), almost everyone will still only watch a handful of them.
> Art's going to get weird, and censorship will be nigh on impossible.
Bad news there, I'm afraid. AI you can run on your personal device, is quite capable of being used by the state to drive censorship at the level of your screen or your headphones.
I loved this when he posted it.
Taking this a step further, and being facetious, I'm thinking of starting my own network! It's all me, all the time. Sometimes I'll be a nature show, sometimes I'll be in a spy movie, sometimes I'll have the guys from Mystery Science Theater 3000 cracking jokes at how dumb I am. Can't be that hard to do what this guy did, only in twenty-four different genres, one for each hour of the day. Turn it on, let it play.
I think it would be fun. Having said that, can you imagine somebody with mental illness, perhaps that makes them paranoid, having an AI interweave them into a spy thriller or murder mystery?
People already took computers too seriously before ChatGPT and the like. Having some official-sounding narrator, somebody you know from previous appearances, helping you out in your fantasy life?
As much fun as this is going to be, it also bothers me quite a bit.
You might have Misophonia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misophonia
I do agree that crinkly candy wrappers and noisy chips in a movie are annoying, but not extremely so.
But I do get irrationally angry when people talk during movies - to a degree that makes it impossible for me to watch MST3k[0] at all. I like the premise, the jokes are funny etc - but I just can't tolerate people talking over a movie :D
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_Science_Theater_3000
> ... I just gravitated back to the basics. Want to watch a movie? Navigate to it in my file manager and play it with VLC. Music? Just use Winamp 2 or Audacious.
This 100%. Mini PC's are cheap and hook to TVs just as easily.
Years back A friend who lived int he country side wanted to watch a specific Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode. I had it on my server at home and I also happened to have my Linux laptop with me. So I plug my laptop into the TV, sshfs mounted my servers video directory and played it using VLC on his big screen. Took maybe 5 minutes to setup and he was thoroughly impressed that I have "my own streaming service".
Mystery Science Theater 3000 riffing on the Chicken Of Tomorrow documentary:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1G0stojwYjI
> Jackass revealed that the very nature of fame was changing in early-aughts America—that you could become famous by doing whatever it took to hold an audience's attention.
Another good example of this is Mystery Science Theater 3000. They've had the reaction video patented and perfected since the 1990s, and it still feels like nobody can quite hold a candle to how well-presented MST3K is. They also have a great (official!) YouTube channel[0] that uploads their best episodes. Go check it out if you've never heard of them, or just want to come back for the laughs.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/user/mst3kofficial
That was Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode 4.
> In general, the quality of 1932-1942 american cinema (and, to a lesser degree, 1945-1950) far exceeded my expectations.
Survivorship bias? I'm sure there was as much schlock produced back then as there is now, it's just we elevated the best and have forgotten the rest.
Revisiting the bad stuff is the entire premise of MST3K:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_Science_Theater_3000
Compare Mystery Science Theater 3000 with RiffTrax.
MST3K has to clear copyrights for the original films, even though they "mark up" those originals in the same way that McMH does. RiffTrax did not have to clear rights with anyone, at the cost of some customer convenience.
I don't know for certain whether MST3K licensed things because they had to, or because they didn't want to be sued to Hell by film catalog rights-holders. It certainly seems like ridicule, commentary, and parody to me. I don't think it matters all that much whether anyone makes money from it or not. A professor can fairly use photos for educational purposes in a class where all the students pay tuition, right?
As a potential juror, I am prejudicially biased that McMH's use is fair use. If I were a judge looking for a test, I think I would ask "Is it sufficiently transformative that this use does not compete with the original?" For MST3K, you're making motion picture entertainment from existing motion pictures. Watching the MST3K version of a work competes with watching the original. So MST3K is not fair use. But reading McMH does not compete with browsing those real estate listings. So it's probably fair use.
Why not convert it into a community-powered video translation site (and possibly add subtitling capabilities- allow users to enter text to display at bottom)? Also, why not market the kids and teenagers that want to do MST3000-like overdubbing? ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_Science_Theater_3000 )
You might have trouble getting people to pay for it, but maybe you could convert to a non-profit if the goal was to provide tools to help the blind, the deaf, or to translate important works.
A big problem I see with the site now is that there is nothing on the front page that says what it does. You can't expect it to be content driven before people understand what it is or why they should be adding content. Also, how and where were you marketing it? Web apps aren't like the game from the the movie "Field of Dreams". If you build it, people only come if they know that their work will not be wasted. You should have the app say that it will reupload the edited video to Youtube, Vimeo, etc., and that its purpose is just simple Saas video editing for translation (and perhaps subtitling).